State Official: Skepticism Has Always Followed Vaccines
There’s a 200-year-old cartoon that’s famous in public health circles. The drawing depicts a gaggle of startled peasants with miniature cows popping from their limbs and mouths. The caption reads, “The Cow Pock - or - The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation (sic).” For James Watt, the California Department of Public Health’s chief of communicable disease, the cartoon is a reminder that fear and skepticism have attended public vaccination campaigns since immunology’s earliest days.
“I’ve been doing this for 15 years and there have always been questions,” Watt said.
When questions about the whooping cough vaccine lead to high rates of personal belief exemptions in a community, Watt said his office steps in to be part of the conversation. “We do a lot of work to educate parents. We have lots of materials up on our website, we work with partners, particularly pediatricians, to promote what we consider to be healthy choices by providing reliable positive information about immunizations.”
Watt said that with pertussis or measles a community needs to maintain a 95 percent vaccination rate to keep the disease from spreading. When there is an outbreak of those diseases it’s usually children too small to be
Parents at Two SCUSD Schools Skip Vaccines More Often
It took Karen Zampa three tries, but she finally gave her kids chickenpox.
Zampa took her 5 and 7-year-old sons to three “chickenpox parties,” gatherings where an infected child shares lollipops and clothes with healthy kids in an effort to spread the illness.
“For them, the best option was actually getting the chickenpox instead of getting the chickenpox vaccine,” she said.
Zampa chose not to give her sons a chickenpox or Hepatitis B